Becoming Locatable
Twice in one day, two people asked me the same question.
They were both Silicon Valley founders. One has built a mature technical-services company. The other has multiple exits behind him and is now focused on AI governance, risk, and compliance. They do not know each other.
Both are getting to know me. Our conversations are advancing. Each has expressed interest in finding some way for us to become affiliated.
Before we spoke, I sent each of them to dougstandley.com.
I do that now before an important introduction. I have never liked walking into a consequential meeting unprepared, and I do not expect the other person to begin with nothing. The site is a pre-share, but it is also a test. It allows someone to see what I am working on, how I think, and whether there may be enough alignment to make the conversation matter.
Both founders had done the work.
Without prompting, they commented on the quality of the site, its transparency, and especially SIGNALS, the ideas and projects I have chosen to reveal while they are still in motion.
Then each asked some version of the same question.
Why did you build this?
I had answers.
I could explain the design. I could talk about the essays, the work in progress, the collaboration methods, and the larger transition underway as artificial intelligence moves from an instrument we use into an environment we inhabit.
All of those answers were true.
They were not yet the story.
A few months earlier, I was walking through the desert with a podcast in my ears.
I live in Southern Arizona, surrounded by the protected Sonoran Desert. Our home sits inside a nature-conservation community. Almost every day, I walk or hike somewhere between two and a half and six miles. I move at a purposeful pace unless the desert tells me otherwise.
Sometimes wildlife has the right of way.
I listen while I walk. Podcasts, interviews, arguments, discoveries — always learning.
That morning, someone offered a provocation about the torrent of machine-generated content coming toward us. I cannot reconstruct the language verbatim, and I don’t need to. What matters is what I heard.
A call to action: every person should be thinking seriously about the identity they intend to have in a future where AI is no longer a tool we pick up but an environment we live inside. If we do not participate in creating and communicating that identity, we risk disappearing inside the volume, or becoming whatever the machines conclude we are.
My first reaction was societal.
I thought about how many people already say they distrust and fear this technology, and about what becomes of any of us when consequential things occur but no author remains clearly attached to them.
Then the message turned.
It was about me.
I kept walking, but the soul-searching had already begun. Within an hour or so, I had begun shaping the idea into a point of view I am still building.
Then I let it linger.
Ideas sometimes need to remain unresolved long enough to reveal what they are actually asking of us. This one followed me for weeks. It sat beside other questions I had been carrying about artificial intelligence, human agency, responsibility, and the work I still felt compelled to do.
On Mother’s Day, Carrie was in Dallas with our daughter, following a tradition of their own. I was home with Dirk, our bichon.
I opened Claude Cowork and wrote a prompt.
I asked it to go on a journey with me.
By the end of the day, V.01 of dougstandley.com was live. The first essay, “No Lifeguard on Duty,” was there.
This was not normal behavior for me.
For most of my career, I lived by a rule: never become the story.
Understand the business. See what others have missed. Help make the work better. Protect the people who trusted you. Then disappear behind the result.
It was a useful discipline. It kept the focus where it belonged. It made discretion a practice rather than a promise.
That was not the whole truth.
Never becoming the story also protected me.
There is an old passenger who has traveled with me for most of my life. It knows where I began. It remembers the boy, and then the young man, with secrets. It is masterful at presenting that earlier version of me as the more authentic one.
It does not need to shout.
It only needs to ask: Who are you to say this?
I have spent much of my life answering it.
Every morning, before dawn, I read books for one or two hours. It is part discipline, part discovery, and part continuing recovery. I did not cross some finish line years ago and leave that boy behind. I practice becoming the person I chose to become every day.
My professional preference for invisibility was real. So was the protection it offered the old passenger.
When I heard that provocation in the desert, I recognized something I had not expected to find there. The question AI was now posing to everyone — what becomes of the person who leaves no record? — was a question I had been living privately for a long time.
The website did not make the old passenger disappear.
It did something else.
It took away its uncontested veto.
The provocation I heard on that hike could have led me toward a conventional answer: construct a personal brand, broadcast a desired identity, and teach the machines what I want them to believe about me.
That is not what I wanted to build.
A brand can be manufactured. A polished identity can be assembled quickly, especially now. The machines are quite good at producing declarations of expertise, confidence, and purpose.
I wanted to leave evidence.
Evidence of what I am seeing. What I am building. What I am willing to consider before I know exactly where it will lead. Evidence of judgment in motion, with my name attached to it.
SIGNALS is where I reveal some of that evidence, selectively.
I am not attempting to tell everyone everything. I am trying to invent a form of visibility that does not betray discretion.
As a new habit, I also check what the major AI models believe they know about me. The results are revealing. Something is clarifying — and occasionally unnerving — about asking a machine to assemble you from the available record. The result is not necessarily false. It is incomplete in ways the machine cannot always recognize.
Silence leaves a record too.
If I provide no primary evidence, the empty spaces do not remain empty. They are filled by inference, fragments, associations, and whatever other people or systems have made available.
The answer cannot be to control every conclusion. I cannot, and should not, determine what every person or machine believes about me.
But I can actively participate in the authorship of the evidence.
That is what I had begun to build on Mother’s Day, although I am not certain I understood it yet. I was not only responding to a new technological reality, but also confronting a pattern I had carried for decades: the use of invisibility as armor.
The AI question and the personal one had always been the same. I just needed the desert and a provocation to hear it.
Then, in the space of a single day, two founders arrived at the same question.
Why?
The second time I heard it, I did not feel that a branding experiment had succeeded. I felt another call to action.
Write the essay.
Share what I had kept protected.
Intensify the work.
I have to stop treating the site as something adjacent to the impact I hope to have. It has become integral to it.
I am trying to find the boundary between disappearing behind the work and making myself the center of it. I do not have that boundary mapped. Perhaps SIGNALS, the essays, and the projects emerging behind them are how I am learning to draw it.
A living record rather than a finished portrait.
A controlled reveal rather than a declaration.
A way to become locatable without pretending to be complete.
For most of my career, never becoming the story helped me do the work. It also kept the old passenger comfortable.
Privacy still has a vote.
It no longer gets to decide alone.
On process and disclosure: How I make this →